Lo-Fi: Compression, Drift, and Appearance Without Ground

Lo-Fi: Compression, Drift, and Appearance Without Ground develops an ontology of mediated appearance through the concepts of compression, drift, and remainder. It argues that fidelity cannot function as a neutral measure of representation because the referent against which fidelity is judged is itself constituted through mediation. Compression is therefore treated not only as a technical procedure but as a formal structure of determinate appearance: what appears does so through selection, weighting, exclusion, and constraint. Drift names the persistence of recognizable form across transformation without exact replication, while remainder names the perceptible effects produced by acts of exclusion and reduction. Through analyses of degraded signals, compression artifacts, noise, looping, adaptive bitrate streaming, low-resolution imagery, and synthetic degradation, the book develops an account of appearance that does not depend upon an unmediated original or stable ground. Engaging media theory, phenomenology, process ontology, information theory, political theory, and aesthetics, it examines the consequences of this account for perception, temporality, technological infrastructure, visibility, and the politics of resolution.